In a Sunday article which made waves around the blogosphere, The New York Times claimed that internet entrepreneurs, writers and bloggers are keeling over thanks to the strains of the 24/7 global internet culture.

The general consensus on Techmeme.com was that this was nonsense.

The NYT writes :

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December. Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

Of course, to be scientific, you would have to subtract from these few examples the number of deaths and heart attacks in the general population to arrive at a guesstimate of internet publishing’s real rate of attrition.

No doubt there are serious stresses and strains working in the new online environment, but anyone who has worked for newspapers to tight daily deadlines will recognize the same pressures and symptoms.

Try slaving in a factory, repetitively doing the same tasks thousands of times a day. Or surviving the water-cooler politics of office life. Worse, the back-breaking toil of farm work. There are no easy options in “the world of work”.

I think the problem lies, as ever, with meetings, travel, networking and other inconsequentials of the wired-up sector. Networking for the internetizen means Twittering and Tweeting incoherently to hundreds, maybe thousands, of “followers”, mostly without a shred of benefit to the bottom line. Email is another source of stress and should be stamped on ruthlessly, as Michael Arrington of TechCrunch wrote last week.

The Times has this quote from him, “‘I haven’t died yet,’ said Michael Arrington, the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a popular technology blog. ‘At some point, I’ll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen. This is not sustainable,’ he said.”

It all depends on how you do it, naturally. Some people concentrate only on the essentials, others adopt the “4-hour Workweek” by outsourcing everything from triaging email to washing their socks. But, sensibly, it is possible to contain the stresses of the internet life.

You don’t need to be on top of every development, or go to every conference or gig. Internet entrepreneurship can be very rewarding if you can organize your time appropriately.

So what’s new?

Good question.

In the old days, banks took the risk of lending money on themselves and ensured that borrowers would be able to pay it back over time. The recent fad for the securitization of risk meant that they can lend to any Tom, Dick or Harriet, then package up the debts into large parcels of small slices from many borrowers, and sell them onto other banks and finance houses.

These financial instruments, for example : collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), are the financial equivalent of supermarket sausages — nobody knows what’s in them, and many prefer not to.

How will the demise of CDOs affect the small business borrower? In the sense that many startups are categorized as sub-prime, since they don’t have a year or three’s accounts to back up their case, the situation is probably being reassessed.

The policy of reckless securitization is starting to be reversed, according to many accounts. If you have not been caught up in the debt trap created by the sub-prime fiasco, you may just be a better risk than the trailer-park poor, especially as many governments give tax breaks to banks which lend to small businesses.

Let us keep our fingers crossed.

Sir Ronald Cohen is reported to be a close friend of new British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and a donor to the Labour party.

Cohen is the founder of a private equity company, Apax Partners, and has just written an interesting book covering his business activities and philosophy : The Second Bounce Of The Ball: Turning Risk Into Opportunity.

Gems of wisdom from the book include,

“Start young, think big and stick with it.”

“Seek out uncertainties. Risk is where the money is.”

So, if you like excitement mixed in with your business dealings, pre-order the book now.